A Village Ophelia and Other Stories eBook

A VILLAGE OPHELIA

On the East end of Long Island, from Riverhead to
Greenport, a distance of about thirty miles, two country
roads run parallel.

The North road is very near the Sound and away from
the villages; lonely farm-houses are scattered at
long intervals; in some places their number increases
enough to form a little desolate settlement, but there
is never a shop, nor sign of village life. That,
one must seek on the South road, with its small hamlets,
to which the “North roaders,” as they are
somewhat condescendingly called, drive across to church,
or to make purchases.

It was on the North road that I spent a golden August
in the home of Mrs. Libby. Her small gray house
was lovingly empaled about the front and sides by
snow-ball bushes and magenta French-lilacs, that grew
tenderly close to the weather-worn shingles, and back
of one sunburnt field, as far as the eye could see,
stretched the expanse of dark, shining scrub-oaks,
beyond which, one knew, was the hot, blue glitter of
the Sound.

Mrs. Libby was a large iron-gray widow of sixty, insatiably
greedy of such fleshly comforts as had ever come within
her knowledge—­soft cushions, heavily sweetened
dishes, finer clothing than her neighbors. She
had cold eyes, and nature had formed her mouth and
jaw like the little silver-striped adder that I found
one day, mangled by some passing cart, in the yellow
dust of the road. Her lips were stretched for
ever in that same flat, immutable smile. When
she moved her head, you caught the gleam of a string
of gold beads, half-hidden in a crease of her stout
throat. She had still a coarsely handsome figure,
she was called a fine looking woman; and every afternoon
she sat and sewed by the window of her parlor, dressed
in a tight, black gown, with immaculate cuffs about
her thick wrists. The neighbors—­thin,
overworked women, with numerous children—­were
too tired and busy to be envious. They thought
her very genteel. Her husband, before his last
illness, had kept a large grocery store in a village
on the South side of the Island. It gave her
a presumptive right to the difference in her ways,
to the stuff gown of an afternoon, to the use of butter
instead of lard in her cookery, to the extra thickness
and brightness of her parlor carpet.

For days I steeped my soul in the peace and quiet.
In the long mornings I went down the grassy path to
the beach, and lay on the yellow sands, as lost to
the world as if I were in some vast solitude.
I had had a wound in my life, and with the natural
instinct of all hurt creatures, I wanted to hide and
get close to the earth until it healed. I knew
that it must heal at last, but there are certain natures
in which mental torture must have a physical outcome,
and we are happier afterward if we have called in
no Greek chorus of friends to the tragedy, to witness
and sing how the body comported itself under the soul’s